Reflections on our Adventist Guidelines on Abortion, by Nic Samojluk

I want to share with you a letter I sent today to a friend of mine who is doing a great work on behalf of the unborn.

Dear friend,

I noticed that in the recent response you received from the General Conference, you were directed to the Adventist “Guidelines on Abortion.” Some years ago, I received a similar answer from a representative of the GC, and I found the testimony of someone identified as “earlysda” who got the same response.

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earlysda
“I have writeen President Ted Wilson twice about this issue, and both times received a response referring me to the “Guidelines on Abortion” document that the church has. Does our church have “Guidelines on Sabbath-Breaking” or “Guidelines on Stealing” too?”

​ U.S. Abortions Hits Lowest Level Since 1973

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It looks like the reference to the Adventist “Guidelimnes on Abortion” is the standard reponse to everybody who writes to the General Conference regarding the issue of abortion. Do we deal that way on other important doctrinal issues? When someone asks us about the Sabbath, for example, do we say: Read our Guidelines on Sabbath Observance? No! We say, Read Exodus 20!

Why is it that when dealing with the violation of the Sixth Commandment instead of the Fourth, we refer people to our humanly created document dealing with abortion instead of the Decalogue? The apparent reason is that we have set aside what God wrote with his own hand on tables of stone and replaced it with rules of our own devising.

Since the creation of the Adventiust movement, we have emphasized the importance of avoiding the substitution of God’s Word with humanly devised tradition, and we have blamed Rome for having done that, but we now have made the same mistake. We have replaced God’s Word with our own tradition which tends to justify what the Lord has clearly forbidden: the shedding of innocent blood.

This seems to indicate that we have ceased to be God’s chosen people, those who keep God’s Commandments, and are no longer God’s special people with the last message of hope for a perishing world. My opinion is that it is high time for us to abandon those guidelines on killing the most innocent members of humanity and return to a “Thus said the Lord,” because Jesus said: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these you have done it to me!”